How the Orcs Took Over the Academy
RCTs are what happened to thinking
There’s no lightness or joy in thinking anymore.
And thinking — real thinking — needs lightness.
It needs the ability to follow logic like a bouncing ball.
Not as a task. Not as a career step.
Just a natural, unforced response.
You see a thing. You follow it. You don’t force it. You don’t shape it into a grant proposal.
You let logic lead you.
That’s what thinking is.
Not pushing. Not proving. Following.
But we’ve replaced logic with labour.
We’ve made thinking heavy, anxious, and bureaucratic.
Somewhere along the way, the orcs got hold of the academy.
If you’ve read Lord of the Rings, you’ll understand what I mean.
The elves could lie under trees and enjoy the fractals until they arrived at truth — not through force, but through alignment. They didn’t strain. They didn’t compete. They thought because it was in their nature to follow coherence.
But the orcs couldn’t think that way.
They didn’t have the calm, uninvested attention it takes to think well.
So they turned thought into violence.
They demanded deliverables. Measurable outcomes. Data. Something to show.
And that’s how academia fell.
The Best Minds Were Bored Out of the Room
You didn’t have to argue with them.
You just had to wait. They got tired. They left.
Real thinkers can’t survive in systems that treat thinking like mining.
They went elsewhere — into exile, into private practice, into silence.
And what’s left is this grey, bureaucratic cleverness that can’t see its own blindness.
It keeps producing content — papers, guidelines, protocols — but there’s no sight in it.
No light. No actual thinking. Just formatted thought.
The Pinnacle of the Collapse: The Randomized Controlled Trial
RCTs are the perfect symbol of everything that’s gone wrong.
They’re presented as the gold standard of knowledge — but they’re really the death of instinctual, embodied, real-time thought.
They’re designed not to explore, but to prove — to satisfy a funder, to deliver a result, to fit within a protocol.
They flatten the question. They drain the inquiry. They’re allergic to anything spontaneous, interconnected, or alive.
You can’t follow the bouncing ball inside an RCT.
You have to nail it to the floor and hope it still bounces.
And that’s not thinking.
It’s just obedience in a lab coat.
RCTs as a Tool of Exclusion
Let’s be clear: randomized controlled trials aren’t just slow and expensive — they’re also a system of intellectual control.
They allow the administrative class and the evidence-collators — the worker ants — to rise through grind and obedience, while shutting out the people who can actually think.
That’s the real damage.
There aren’t many truly original thinkers in society — and there are fewer every year, because there’s no reward for thinking anymore. No room for people who follow logic rather than procedure.
So when academic institutions shut those people down, it’s not just a career casualty.
It’s a civilizational loss.
We are actively building systems that punish insight and promote safe mediocrity — and we call that education.
The Cost
This isn’t just an academic problem.
It’s a cultural one. A planetary one.
When real thinking gets strangled, we lose more than ideas.
We lose adaptability. We lose humility. We lose the ability to see what’s right in front of us and say, “That matters. Let’s follow it.”
We train people out of noticing.
We punish people for asking the better question.
And we call it progress.
Where This Really Starts
At the heart of it, this isn’t about rigor. It’s about childhood.
Real thinking begins early — through play, pattern recognition, unstructured attention.
You either learn how to follow logic lightly and freely — or you don’t.
About the Author:
Catherine Broué is a systems physiologist. After two decades in ICU and dialysis, she turned to the deeper question of real health, guided by mentors and the insights of Bohr and Buteyko. Her work centres on the body’s true regulators — breath and the central nervous system — and the return to parasympathetic dominance.